Bush gets real with Gaetz on education reform, coy on future

Before a meeting with Senate President Don Gaetz on
Thursday, former Gov. Jeb Bush said he believed the parent trigger bill
introduced this week would pass.

"As I understand what the law is, it’s a pretty simple law,”
Bush said. “If you’re in a failing school, parents oughta have the ability, if
they want to, to have a say, simply a say, in providing advice on what structure
a failing school should take. That doesn’t say they can do like in California where they
can convert a charter school or do something else, it simply says parents’
voice matters. If that’s a radical idea in America today, then we’re in a heap
of trouble.”

A bill filed this week by Kelli Stargell, R-Lakeland, would allow
parents at failing schools to choose a strategy to turnaround a school via a
petition. One option could allow the school to be converted to a charter school. A similar bill was defeated last year, but Bush said he thinks this year it will pass.

Earlier on Thursday, Bush met with House
Republicans and Speaker Will Weatherford. Reporters didn’t speak to him at that
event, and were only able to ask a couple of questions before his meeting with
Gaetz.

Bush hasn’t visited the Capitol since 2010, so he was asked
why he was meeting with lawmakers. Bush said as the head of the non-profit
Foundation for Excellence in Education, he was there to “say hello to friends
and advance the cause of rising student achievement.”

Gaetz met with Bush for more than 20 minutes – twice as long as he met
with Weatherford – and discussed more education topics, Gaetz said after the
meeting. Like he did after meeting with House Republicans, Bush left by exiting
through a door where there were no reporters.

Gaetz said he and Bush first got to know each other in the
early 1990s. Gaetz was considering a run for school board in Okaloosa County
and his friend, Joe Scarborough, asked him to meet Bush.

“And so the three of us sat in this empty restaurant for about
two hours while Jeb Bush gave me all these reasons to run for the school board,”
Gaetz said. “We’ve been good friends ever since.”

During Thursday's meeting, Gaetz told his good friend that a flurry of reforms (Common
Core national standards, teacher evaluations tied to pay, end-of-course exams
for the FCAT) were proving difficult to implement.

“We have a lot of reform that had kind of shot off like
rockets,” Gaetz said. “All of that was coming down now from the sky, in the
same place at the same time. And I shared with him my concern that the
Department of Education had not done a good job in implementing those reforms.”

He said Bush, who helped push for much of that reform, wasn’t
having it.